I tried to explain that, if this were a bath, I preferred it without the family linen, but the femme de chambre seemed so shocked at these protestations, that I ceased uttering them, and determined to make the best of things as they stood.

When I was again alone, after several rehearsals I found a way of accommodating the human form to the hybrid receptacle, and was amazed at its luxuriousness.  The secret of this lay in the sheet, which was fragrant of lavender, and protected the body from contact with a cold, base metal which hundreds of other bodies must have touched before.

“’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands,” might be said of a hotel bath-tub as well as of a stolen purse; and having once known the linen-lined bath of Aosta, I was promptly spoiled for common, un-lined tubs.  This was a lesson not to form hasty opinions; but being a normal man, I shall no doubt continue to do so until the day of my death.

The Boy and I broke our fast together on the loggia, which was even more entertaining as a salle-a-manger by morning than by night.  The coffee was exquisite; the hot, foaming milk had but lately been drawn from its original source, a little biscuit-coloured Alderney with the pleading eyes of that fair nymph stricken to heiferhood by jealous Juno.  The strawberries and figs came to the table from the hotel garden, and so did the luscious roses, which filled a bowl in the centre of our small white table.

This was Arcadia.  The very simplicities of the hotel endeared it to our hearts, and there was no real comfort lacking which we could have obtained in London or in Paris.

After breakfast we set off with our cameras to the town, a walk of ten or fifteen minutes.  It was strange, in this pilgrimage of mine, how often I found myself running back into the Feudal or Middle Ages, as far removed from the familiar bustle of modern days as if an iron door had been shut and padlocked behind me.

There was little of the Twentieth Century in Aosta (named by Augustus the “Rome of the Alps"), except the monument to “Le Roi Chasseur,” and the bookshops, which seemed extraordinarily well supplied with the best literature of all countries.  The type of face we met was primitive; scarcely one which would have been out of place on some old Roman coin.  Here, at the end of a narrow, shadowed street, where St. Anselm first saw the light (it must have been with difficulty) we came upon a magnificent archway, built to do honour to Augustus Caesar’s defeat of the brave Salasses, four and twenty years before the world had a Saviour.  A few steps further on, and we were under the majestic mass of the Porta Pretoria; or we were crossing a Roman bridge, or gazing at the ruins of Roman ramparts.  Or, we lost our way in searching for the amphitheatre, and found ourselves suddenly skipping over centuries into the Middle Ages, represented by the mysterious Tour Bramafam, the Tour des Prisons, or the Tour du Lepreux, round which Xavier Maistre wrote his pathetic dialogue.  Then, there was the cathedral with its extraordinary painted facade, like a great coloured picture-book; and the tall cross, straddling a spring in a paved street, put up in thanksgiving by the Aostans when they joyfully saw Calvin’s back for the last time.